Stacey
Welcome to the senior pet podcast, A show dedicated to giving our senior four legged family members. They’re happiest and healthiest lives. Now join our senior pet experts. Veterinarian Dr Stacy Bone, an animal health insider, Ron de Vries, as they discuss why old age is not a disease, huh? Welcome to the senior pet podcast. My name is Dr Stacy Bone. I’m a small animal veterinarian and senior pet expert. And with me, as always, is my co host, Animal Health insider, Ron de Vries. Ron, how are you?
Ron
I am fantastic. Thank you.
Stacey
Good. Glad to hear it. So today’s topic of conversation, Ron, is what is a senior?
Ron
Yeah. When my dog or cat starts to get AARP delivered to the house, I know they’re a senior,
Stacey
you know, that’s one way, certainly of telling. But, you know, I think that it shocks a lot of people when they see their pet running around the house. That there that they actually are a senior. So, really, Before we get into the full topic, I think it’s important to take a second and define what a senior is. And so let’s go into the numbers. And Ron did a really great job of kind of covering this last time in your hot spots. Iran. If you could give us like a 15 2nd overview of kind of, what? The hot spot. Was.
Ron
Well, yeah, we talked about some of the new research being done on pet aging and how it compared to human aging, because for whatever reason, we love to compare other things to ourselves. And it makes it easier that way to get a real grass pond when something’s a senior and when we might start expecting things to start needing more attention, I was going to say going wrong, but But that’s different for everybody to include our cats and dogs,
Stacey
right? And I think we tend to be a little bit cavalier on the topic and the things that we say. But I know that that when we say things like Senior and it’s a little bit of concern and things like that, it just ultimately means that these pets need a little bit Maur care and a little bit more watching. So, Ron, I guess the question that I have for you is at what age do you consider a dog to be a senior.
Ron
Stacy is. You know, um, I’ve only had pugs for the last, uh, I don’t know, 20 years practically. So. So I know that when my pug gets to be cash around 10 I start considering them a senior night. I think I might have to start doing it sooner,
Stacey
right? And so let’s start with small dogs. Because I think you had a really big thing there, right? Which is you cannot classify all dogs together, you know? I mean, it would be kind of crazy to say that you have a pug which is, like the sports car of the veterinary world, right? And then you have, you know, that you have no right, right? And then you have a great day. And those two breeds of dogs are nothing similar to each other. What they deal with in their lives, in the health issues that have a completely different So if we stick with small breed dogs And so that’s even another thing we have to define Ron. What do you think is a small breed dog?
Ron
I guess it would be anything that I can quickly pick up without hurting my back.
Stacey
Right? I mean, I think for purposes of our world, we say, you know, usually less than £25 is where I would kind of call it a small breed. But you ask 15 veterinarians and you’re gonna give 15 different answers. And so, for a small breed dog, we start calling them seniors at about eight years of age. And that actually has a very defined range. We usually say 8 to 11 years of age is considered a senior, and that’s kind of crazy. And I guess I’ll talk about Bailey again. Who’s my cedar? Jack Russell. You I lost, you know, earlier this year. I mean it. 11 years of age. That dog could do miles running. I mean, she was just built for athleticism. And the crazy thing about it was, is that by definition she would have been a quote-unquote senior at that point, right? And so kind of shocked me a little bit, and I was one of those people who was emotionally invested enough in my animal that I wouldn’t probably have ever put that thought into my own mind. So over the age of 11 is actually where we start using the term geriatric, and I hate that term, so we’re not gonna use that very often. The term you’re gonna use is super senior new words. You were super senior, and I really think that that’s important because super seniors, in a connotation that, you know, this dog is not feeble. It’s not falling apart at the seams, but it just again is a one step above a senior pet. And so, Ron, let’s go next to the large breeds. What do you think of Ah, what would you call a large breed dog?
Ron
A senior if eight years old is where we start classifying a small breed dog is a senior. Then I’m going to go six or seven.
Stacey
Yeah, and so 5 to 7 is typically where we will call a doxy or so close. So close. So close. Ah, largely dog, which I would classify as above £60. Right? So most of our Labradors obviously are great Danes, Bernese, mountain dogs, things like that. You know of five years of age, they’re starting to be considered seniors. I mean, you sometimes think to yourself I just got this dog with other already considered to be a senior and again. It is something that we have to keep in the back of our minds as our animals age, because again, and we’ll get into this quite a bit when you go to your vet with your great Dane who’s five years of age, you have to understand that when that veterinarian makes us make those recommendations or when you choose nutritional recommendations for your own pet, you have to do it with the mind set off. I’m buying for a senior, right? And so what we call super seniors for large breed dogs anything over eight years of age. So 88 plus years of age is considered a super senior for a large breed dog. So it is very paramount that as they hit that super senior title, right Ron is that they they get to a vet a little bit more often and they get a little bit more care more often.
Ron
The clock’s running a little bit faster, and it’s critical that they get to that veterinarian more frequently, especially as it becomes seniors.
Stacey
And last but not least, we do not want to alienate them is our cats. And so, Ron, this is a little bit tougher because there’s a whole lot of different breeds of cats out there. But what would you consider to be a senior cat?
Ron
Well, you told us last time that the, uh, a cat ages at about four years for every human year, if you will, so I would probably throw that at five year excuse.
Stacey
If that’s the case, I am now a senior. This gets said,
Ron
I gotta start doing what I had. So So, around the age of 12.
Stacey
Yeah. So So you’re right on. I mean, honestly, we consider senior cats at 11 to 14 but I would argue that again. That’s very breed specific. And you’re gonna say, Well, how do we know every county walks in the door or that we go to rescue is a domestic shorthair, right? But there are certainly a couple of breeds of cats like the Maine coon that would be considered to be ageing a little bit quicker. So the main gentle giant is the large breed cat version that we have. And so where do we call cats? Super seniors 15 plus years of age and we see 15 plus year old cats all the time. I mean, frankly, I think we’re shocked if our cats don’t hit 15 years of age. But again, cats of the great pretenders and the great hiders of diseases and things like that. So it is a good get, really important to kind of keep in the back of your mind that there’s a reason that we’re doing bloodwork yearly on AR 15 plus year old cats. I mean, that’s super, super, super important. So that is defining exactly what a senior is. Ron Anything, Dad?
Ron
No, Those cats amaze me. The predator in, um causes them to not want to show their weaknesses while they’re out hunting prey to include me. If I’m sitting in the same room, I always feel like I’m being watched, and, uh and you’ll never know what’s wrong with them because they’re not going to show it.
Stacey
It’s pretty amazing. And it will certainly tell a lot of stories kind of as we go through here. But But I can’t tell you the number of times that I would have a cat. You know, even an older cat dropped off for grooming that stresses them out, and they would go into full on heart failure while they were there, because that stress pushed them over the edge of being totally okay and handling a disease just fine. And then I can’t deal with it anymore. So, unfortunately, cats love to hide things, and we will definitely get into that on a future episode. So, Ron, why don’t we take a break real quick? And when we come back, what we’re gonna do is we’re going to talk about why the heck we care what age are. Animals are, and we’ll be right back. And we are back. So, Ron, in the last section, we kind of covered You know what it means? Number is wise to be a senior. So now the question that I have for you is is why do we care,
Ron
Stacy? That’s why we’re here, right? The senior pet podcast is all about educating ourselves and others on why we need to care that our pets are seniors.
Stacey
Yeah, and so we’ve said it before. It will say it again, and we will repeat ourselves until everybody is mentioning it in their sleep. That old age is not a disease, but the processes that occur as we age is what causes disease. So we’re gonna pause, soak that up for a second and understand that as we age a lot of things happen with our bodies. And so if we approach a pets or for me as a veterinarian approach of veterinary visit, knowing that that pen is considered a senior, it completely changes the mindset of how we manage diseases and what are in goals are. And so that’s the first reason why I personally think it matters. It changes your mindset. So if you walk into the vet with a dog who’s five years of age or a dog, that’s 12 or 13 years of age. How does your mindset change?
Ron
Yeah, personally, I’m always looking for different things that stand out as to why a pet maybe behaving a certain way dog in particular in this case on Guy had this conversation with my wife, probably within the last two weeks, when our small pug that was standing at the top of the stairs would just stand there and bark at her. And to our point, I said, Do you think that she’s having issues going down those stairs, or is she just being stubborn and I’d argue that she may be having issues going down those stairs,
Stacey
right? And I think that that’s really important because of a lot of things that we see as pet owners or even I see is a veterinarian are things that are normal quote unquote normal for aging. But there are things that aren’t and sometimes we can convince ourselves that staring at a wall for hours on end is a normal process. You know, the dog sees a ghost or what have you, but in reality that’s a very early symptom of cognitive disease, one of the big things. And like I said, I feel bad because we’re gonna mention these often wrong with Rudy and me with Bailey. But one of the very first symptoms of cognitive disease is you actually throw your dog a treat and they miss it. They or they can’t find it on the floor. And that happened to Bailey probably two plus years before I ever realized that she had cognitive disease, because I, as an owner, didn’t put my dog into the senior or, in her case, super senior category. She was running. She was jumping. She wanted to go on walk she was eating great. But behind the scenes was a process that was starting to develop. And so again, Ron is absolutely 100% correct. I’m gonna look at things differently when I realized my pet is a senior, the second thing and I’m probably gonna throw this to Ron because I’ll be honest with you. He’s got years and years and years of this experience. But the second thing is nutrition. Because nutrition changes as we age,
Ron
it really runs the gambit to write. What is our food made of right? How much protein is in the food, right? We get carbohydrates, fat proteins, but one of the other things you have to start taking into account. And this goes for cats as well, is Are they eating? Are they getting enough protein? We wanted to maintain that muscle mass and a lot of disease States come into play here, and I’m not going to take a very deep dive into something I’m not as familiar with his doctor Stacy is. But we do know that we want to keep that body condition up, because sometimes people will tend to think that their pet may not be as healthy as they actually are, because their body starts to lose that muscle.
Stacey
And that’s something that a lot of people don’t understand is that your energy required, particularly cats, increases as they age. It’s almost a reverse the bell curve. So when they’re really, really young, they need a lot of calories that drops off is they get to middle age. But it starts to creep up when they hit senior in super senior categories, and so you need to make sure that you’re feeding that the appropriate amount of calories. So the other thing Ron and I’ll ask you is if I had a 10-year-old dog on and I walked up to you know, I said, Ron, what? What the heck do I feed this dog? What would you ask me or what would you tell me?
Ron
I would ask what you’ve been feeding that dog to this point. Um, when was the last veterinary visits you had? And did anything come from that veterinary visit that might lead you to think that you need to take certain precautions Maur than just an increase in protein? Or maybe considering supplementing the diet?
Stacey
Yeah, my favorite term that I use as we feed for function. So when a dog hits a senior category, there are very few of them that they don’t have at least one medical issue that could probably be addressed with nutrition. And whatever that nutrition is. It’s exceedingly important to understand that you can feed a diet that can probably help to address that issue again, a topic of conversation that will get into probably when we talk about each individual disease process. But I want to mention one final thing that I think is really something important, and I’m gonna watch Ron’s face when I mentioned this because he doesn’t know I’m going to say it. Ron, what are your thoughts on all life stage diets? There it is.
Ron
I think that maybe somebody that’s been buying their their pets food at a grocery store because there’s only so much space for for nutrition, for pet nutrition specifically. And I guess between not feeding your pet and feeding your pet, uh, you know, pet food. I guess that’s the next best alternative. So I don’t hold it with the highest of esteem. If that’s what you’re asking,
Stacey
right, and I think that the bare bones because we’re gonna cover nutrition in the future episode. We know that that’s a hot button issue, and neither Ron nor myself as a veterinarian are here to tell anybody to change. Their diets were just trying to kind of layout on objective discussion about it. But the thing with all life stages do you? What that is, is it kind of plays on our desire to never want to change. The thing of it is, is that I think any one of us who’s listening would say that the thing you feed a puppy is probably not the same thing. You would want to feed that dog when they’re 14 or 15 years of age, right? We goes back to that feed for function. And while we don’t want to change our diets, sometimes it’s a very paramount thing to do to make sure we’re feeding appropriately for the life stays that they’re in and again, a conversation that we’re gonna we’re gonna cover in depth in the future. The final reason why I guess I’m gonna argue that it matters is for vet visits. But I think that what we find is that as we’re seniors, you know, whether it’s me or whether it’s my pets. The older they are, the more often they go to the doctor. So we’ve already covered that one cat years the equivalent of four human years, and that most cats are gonna hit 15 years of age, right? So, yeah. So quick. Math. That’s a 60 year old cap. All right. Am I doing the math right here that I’m not a mathematician, but a 60 year old person? How often run and you’re not 60. But how often do you think a 60 year old person should go to the doctor
Ron
From my experience being in the waiting room at my general practitioner, there are more seniors in there that I thought were alive.
Stacey
I mean, you certainly wouldn’t go once every four years, right? And so this is why we argue that, you know, especially with cats, and we call cats the hiders, the great pretenders. My favorite is weight loss, you know, I mean, you can have a pet sitting around your house for a long period of time and and I say this from experience because it’s happened more times than I can count that we will put that cat on the scale. And I will say, Do you know that Tinkles lost £4 since the last time you were in here? Oh, no. No, I didn’t. You think that skills, right? We get the other scale we put him on and certain. Sure enough that cats lost £4 but doesn’t physically look any different, right? Because the cat was overweight to begin with. And so what? We end up diagnosing the cat is, you know, with his things, like early renal insufficiency or hyperthyroidism or things of that nature. But we never would have caught that had that cat not ever come into the vet. And so we’re gonna argue that twice a year visits probably really important, and we get it. I mean, I think Ron and I both understand that it is not fun to take your animal to the veterinarian. It’s not fun to carve out the time to do it, but it’s probably really important that you do so. The second part of that equation is the more often year the vet, the more likely you are to catch a disease before it’s progressed. And I think the big thing with that is, is that then we realize that treating a disease or a process early in its life is way easier. Been treating something after it’s already said in taking up shop.
Ron
It goes back to the ounce of prevention versus a pound of cure. Absolutely. That I’ve heard somebody say that not even sure what it means,
Stacey
Right? And so those air Really I mean, I argue. Yes, absolutely. It matters. You know, if we understand or recognize that our animal is a senior or in many cases, a super senior, so that really covers the topics I guess that that I wanted to get into today, Ron, which is you know, what is a senior and why does it matter that we know are pen is a senior, So we’re gonna take a quick break and we’re gonna come back. I think Ron’s gots another hot spot for us. We’ll be right back. All right, everybody, welcome back. So, Ron, what’s on your mind today?
Ron
What is my hot spot today, Stacy? It’s all about pet spending. What are we spending on our pets specifically in the United States? Right? I’m sure it’s different. All over the world, the peninsula country you’re in. But where we live in the United States, that’s what I’m gonna touch on. And I don’t know that the numbers necessarily surprised me. But sometimes what? I am surprised with us where the money is spent. So they say that in research showed that in 2018 I call it research is really an article I read right, but they’re all they’re all within a couple of bucks. Either way, the average dog owner spent $259 for their pet in 2018. That was to 28 per cat, which I guess if you break it down by pound, it probably works out that way or something like that, unless there’s a lot of Maine coons out there. But what’s really interesting to me is that number is up 73% since 2000. Holy cow. I would imagine, um, owning a car or a house is not up 73% from the year 2000. So So the thing that I think about is, why is it up 73% since the year 2000? But what are we spending that on and that’s really that’s really my hot spot is where we spending that and and if you walk into a pet store or you walk into or you or you click on one of these big websites that sells a lot of pet related items, you’ll see a lot of those items probably consist of the things that we would promote the least. And that is treats. You know, food is Love is one of the one of the statements that we hear most frequently, and that’s why the canine and feline obesity rate is so high. So with that in mind, talking about treats, talking about where we don’t want to spend our money and where we should spend our money again. We’re not here to tell people what to spend their money on for their pets. But roughly the number works out to about 1% of somebody’s total income is spent on their pets. I was actually surprised. I thought that number would be just a little bit higher. But but spending that money appropriately is probably what we need to look at and and again here on the senior pet podcast. What we’re really promoting is spending Maur that money on good health, and that includes getting that pet to the veterinarian like we talked about, that cat needs to go to the vet more than every four years and in human life. So if you could get that cat to the vet twice a year, which I know is a struggle. But getting that dog to the vet at least every year is critical to keep in that. Whether it’s a senior or super seniors we talked about earlier is critical to good pet ownership and helping that pet live a long, healthy life. So whether you like to buy new toys for your dog or cat, great nutrition is a good place to spend it again. We’re not promoting anyone nutrition over another. We certainly recommend good nutrition, and we’ll leave it at that. But but getting them proper care and spending that $259 for your dog or 228 on veterinary care is critical.
Stacey
Well, I think it’s probably important to know those numbers to write, because you can kind of start to put a little bit of that aside ahead of time, knowing that there’s a good chance. I’m going to be spending around $250 a year on my pet, and I’ll be honest with you. I’ve seen it go a lot higher than that. I’ve seen it go a lot lower than that. I think the argument is, is that and I’ll be 100% honest with you? I think that veterinary care is not gonna get any cheaper, you know, whatever you can do to kind of help defray. Some of those costs are really important. Rounded it say in there, How big of an industry pet care is, money-wise.
Ron
I think it was somewhere over 70 billion
Stacey
dollars. Yeah, it’s unbelievable. I think the last thing that I looked at, it was like 84 billion, like, it’s just unbelievable again. I think that ultimately the purpose of that article is to say, Hey, you know, let’s look at where we’re spending this money along terms the super interesting, super interesting. I can’t believe that it’s grown 73%. That’s unbelievable. Shocking. Yeah,
Ron
And when you include veterinary care in there, Stacy, I don’t think that that number should go down because when I look at some of those numbers, I think $228 spent on a cat. That’s probably not to veterinary visits a year. So
Stacey
and so you don’t Do you think that article included that care in it?
Ron
I thought that it I thought that that included veterinary in it because it was, uh it was just purely about pet spending.
Stacey
Yeah, and so I think that they probably just took a pretty and I don’t know how many people they, you know, they looked after this, but it probably took a pretty good average in there cause I would argue that most of my quote-unquote wellness visits probably ranged in the $300 plus area. Because when you start to add in flea and tick medications and hardware, medications and things like that, I mean with vaccines, you’re already talking about going up. So, you know, the good news is, is that I think a lot of people are starting to recognize this, and we’re starting to see a pretty good of growth of affordable care options in veterinary medicine. And I think we’re going to see a lot of that go forward. A lot of your larger companies. They’re starting to do that, and they’re going to serve a really nice place in veterinary medicine to give people an option for preventative care that if they have financial concerns. So I look forward to seeing kind of more of that as we go forward in that med so supercool Ron. Thanks for bringing that that to our attention, and it’s,
Ron
Not what you spend. It’s where you spend
Stacey
exactly and so, thank you, everyone for tuning into, Ah, this episode of the senior pep podcast again, you can reach out to us at any time. At the senior pet podcast at gmail dot com, I think on topic for the next time around is we’re going to talk a little bit, Maura bouts kind of senior pet healthcare. Why the heck did we make the recommendations we make and what to look for? Whenever you’re animals are our aging that requires a veterinary visit visit sooner rather than later. So thanks again for joining us, and we will speak with you all again soon. Thank you for listening to the senior pet podcast. Be sure to subscribe to catch our next episode and follow us at the senior pet podcast on your social media of choice. The information in this podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional veterinary advice, diagnosis or treatment. Please consult your veterinarian with many concerns about your individual pet.